Digital Humanities

 

Lab Session: Digital Humanities

This blog is a reflection on my learning journey through activities assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad as part of our digital humanities study. The main focus of the task was to explore the question, “Can a computer write poetry?” through Oscar Schwartz’s perspective and to engage with different digital tools that connect literature and technology.

In this blog, I share my experience of taking a test to identify whether a poem was written by a human or a computer, exploring the CLiC Dickens Project and Activity Book, and experimenting with Voyant tools such as Cirrus, Links, Dreamspace, and Phrases. By writing about these activities, I aim to document not only what I learned but also how these tools changed the way I look at literature and creativity.The purpose of this blog is to record my personal and academic growth, and to show how digital approaches can enrich traditional literary studies.

1. Understand how once we used to debate on if machines can write poems.

Was this poem written by a human or a computer?

As part of our exploration of digital literature, we were tasked with analyzing a poem to determine whether it was written by a human or a computer. This activity helped us understand the differences in creativity, style, and language patterns between human-written and AI-generated texts.

• My Experience:
  I scored 10 out of 6, which shows that the task was challenging but engaging. It made me more aware of how AI can mimic human writing, yet subtle patterns like repetitive phrasing or unusual syntax can give clues about its origin.

• Learning Outcome:
  This task highlighted the critical reading skills needed to distinguish between human creativity and machine-generated text. It also connected to our larger activity of analyzing patterns in literature, showing that digital tools can both aid and challenge our interpretation of texts.

2. Learning Outcomes from Voyant Tools Activity

1. Textual Frequency Analysis

   • Students learn how to identify the most frequent words (e.g., mr, said, miss, think, know), which reveal patterns of character interactions, narrative focus, and stylistic tendencies in Austen’s novels.

2. Trends Across the Text

   • The Trends graph shows how specific words (said, mr, mrs, miss, think) rise and fall in relative frequency across different sections, teaching students to trace thematic or narrative progression.

3. Contextual Reading

   • The Contexts tool allows students to see how words (like mr) are used in different narrative situations, helping them analyze dialogue, characterization, and tone.

4. Comparative Insights

   • The Summary tool highlights distinctive vocabulary across Austen’s works (e.g., willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, crawford in Mansfield Park), showing how Voyant can support comparative literary analysis.

5. Digital Humanities Skills

Students gain experience with digital tools for literary analysis, bridging traditional close reading with computational  methods.

1. Visualization of Language Patterns

   • The Cirrus word cloud visually demonstrates key terms and themes, helping students quickly grasp the text’s dominant vocabulary.

Bubbles View: This visualization highlighted the most frequently used words in the novel as differently sized bubbles. Larger bubbles represented more common words such as Mr. , Elizabeth, Darcy, marriage, and Bennet. It gave me a quick overview of the central concerns of the novel.

In short:

From this lab, students learn to use digital tools to uncover word frequency, thematic patterns, character focus, and stylistic features in literary texts, developing both critical reading and digital humanities skills.

3. CLic Activity Book - Study material site

This is gruop activity given by sir so, me and Nirali deal with chapter 13) The fire place pose - texts and cultural context.

Activity 13.1 The social importance of the fire-place

Explaining Activity 13: The Social Importance of the Fireplace

For our group activity, Nirali Vaghela and I (Nikita Vala) explored the representation of the fireplace in 19th century literature, focusing particularly on Charles Dickens’s novels. The main goal was to understand the “fireplace pose”, a literary motif where the fireplace often symbolizes warmth, family, social gathering, or introspection.

Activity 13.1 – Dickens’s Novels

1. Searching for “fire”

   
   
   

We started by searching for the word “fire” in Dickens’s novels using the DNov corpus (Dickens’s Novels in Digital Form).  This allowed us to:

Observations

we noticed recurring patterns of the fireplace pose, such as:

• Characters gathering back to the fire

• Fireplaces associated with comfort, warmth, or social interactions

• Emotional or reflective moments happening near the fire

Activity 13.2 – 19th Century Literature Beyond Dickens

1. We repeated the concordance search for “fire” in other 19th century novels.

2. Observations

3. We found that similar fireplace poses appear across 19th century literature, often serving as:

Conclusion / Learning Outcome

Through this activity, we learned how digital tools help identify recurrent patterns in literature, making it easier to study motifs like the fireplace pose. It also showed us the social importance of the fireplace in 19th century narratives, both as a physical space and a symbolic element.

Thank you.